Q&A


Jane Long, team lead of FPCA’s multiyear Creating a Culture of Calling initiative, provides background on the project’s origins, purpose, and direction.


What is this project about? It’s not difficult to see the many ways in which faith formation for 21st-century Christians of all ages involves so many more challenges than perhaps at any time in the history of the American church. It is these challenges that Vibrant Faith, an interdenominational organization, is striving to address— training and equipping church leaders nationwide to recognize the ever- changing realities of our 21st-century lives and, in doing so, create fresh visions for forming faithful disciples of Jesus Christ.


It is through Vibrant Faith that the Lilly Endowment funded its recent initiative, Creating a Culture of Calling—Called to Lives of Purpose and Meaning, otherwise known as the C3 Project. As one of only 24 participating churches comprised of many different denominations across the country, FPCA is uniquely situated to experiment and contribute to this important effort and to benefit from the efforts of those other churches.


“See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?” As the senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York City recently wrote, “God’s up to something; will the church be a part?” If we fail to recognize that what got us “here” will not get us into the future, we risk losing generations of disciples who will never know what it means to live lives of meaning and purpose that God has for all of us.


Is the C3 initiative tied to this year’s sermon series? Yes, but the C3 Project is much


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more than this year’s sermon series. Continuing through 2020, it is dedicated to promoting congregational cultures of vocation (calling) that will help us as Christians discern and nurture our callings from God throughout our entire lives and equip us to live into those callings wherever we may be, no matter what our age, in our work, homes, faith communities, and world.


Why is a culture of calling so important? One author described it like this: “Your culture is the lens through which you view your life. If you change the lens, you change everything. Change the culture and everything changes, including the future.” Is the lens through which we view our lives, everything that we do, and everything that we are, a faithful response to the fact that we—and all people—belong to God?


What has been accomplished so far? As one of the C3 churches, FPCA has been asked to innovate with calling activities across all ages of our congregation. FPCA’s annual Leadership Retreat last fall introduced our church leaders to Creating a Culture of Calling. An exercise called “5 Cups of Coffee: Having the God Conversation” was used. Tese laminated cards are available to anyone who would like to use them and have filtered their way into Session meetings and several small groups. Our children in Sunday morning DIG have been learning about the concept of calling. Calling videos have been shown in alternative worship. A new small group


initiative has begun, recognizing that we discover and nurture our unique gifts in relationship with each other, with others often seeing in us things we cannot see for ourselves. And we’ve surveyed the congregation on calling, receiving more than 350 illuminating responses that will help guide FPCA planning and provide feedback by which Vibrant Faith can evaluate its efforts.


What’s ahead? Our goal is to infuse vocational formation—our response to God—into all aspects of our church life together. If you have ideas for activities that would help you or others discern vocations, please let me know.


Because we so often discover our callings through others, an important aspect of the C3 Project involves storytelling, both within age groups and across generations. Tis is an exciting prospect for us as we find new ways to share with each other how each of us has uniquely lived into our callings in ever-evolving ways. I would love to see us develop “affinity groups” of people who come together to share conversations around how they live out shared vocations. Affinity groups could be an innovative platform for the final year of the C3 Project, which will involve engaging with those outside of our church through themes of calling.


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